On a job application for a teaching position one is asked to write a one-page essay on “my favorite book.” Here’s what I’ve got. Thoughts? Do you have a favorite? If so, can you let…
Browsing Category Briefs
The Dystopian Immorality of The Hunger Games
So, I’ve finished The Hunger Games. The trilogy. I’m not sure what to say about it. I found it always vaguely unsatisfying and too easy with its killing. It tries to subvert this by the…
Adrienne Rich, May 16, 1929 – March 27, 2012
Perhaps Rich is wrong in the poem below when she asserts “Not of course here.” THE SCHOOL AMONG THE RUINS Beirut the possibility of a prolonged erection (called priapism)selectively specific substances or to determine…
The Unexceptional, Unsurprising Success of America’s Bully Class
Here is a paragraph from Salon.com’s Andrew O’Hehir on the MPAA’s choice to rate the documentary about school bullying “R” and thus limit and restrict access to the kids who already live worse lives than…
Walking and Talking: Wilco’s One Sunday Morning
Yesterday, Wednesday morning, I walked the dogs, as usual, uphill on 1st street (east) around 8 a.m. It seemed a perfect morning. A chill air balanced by a warming sun; a blue sky with long…
The Mind Arrested and Raised Above Desire
Stephen Dedalus on “esthetic stasis” as the “proper, esthetic emotion.” —Aristotle has not defined pity and terror. I have. I say— Lynch halted and said bluntly: —Stop! I won’t listen! I am sick. I…
You Can Make or You Can Sing
I said yesterday something that I thought was quite pithy if not something assured or useful: the brain is a kind of quantum reckoning, always and forever eluding investigation; the body seems rather to adhere…
De Sade In the Hizzle and Fizzle
Huxley, author of A Brave New World, to Orwell, author of 1984. The twin totalitarian fictions of the last century. Which is being realized? Well, my take: We have been living in Huxley’s world since…
You Are What You Eat
You remember the 70s PSA “Time for Timer?” No? C’mon! How old are you? I still sing them to myself, but mostly the one about cheese: the lyric “I hanker for a hunk of cheese”…
Art Thou Pale for Weariness…
“Like a joyless eye/finding no object worth its constancy.” The following excerpt from Joyce’s Portrait seems usefully illustrative of the previous post. And really, illustrative of the modern mind. Joyce seems dead on in Simon…